Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, MolecularLab.it has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 100 companies, associations, foundations and academic institutions. MolecularLab.it is encouraging its members to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

To join, members should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

“World Community Grid provides our busy members with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Riccardo Fallini. “We are asking our members to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”

In its first year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which provided scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared with just 12 months on World Community Grid.

On November 21, World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home. FightAIDS@Home, which is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus from maturing and thus is a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life.

Possible future projects will address global humanitarian issues, such as new and existing infectious disease research; genomic and disease research; and natural disasters and hunger.

MolecularLab.it is asking that members who join World Community Grid become a member of the MolecularLab.it team. Please go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and become a member today.